[rescue] Sun Kit Needed for EE Student Here

[Bryan Gurney]

>> Exactly.  I.e. my Windows machine is stuck in W98-land.  The
>> apps that it runs suit me just fine.  I have no need to upgrade
>> to the latest feature (bug) set for each of those applications
>> (with the attendant increase in resource requirements without
>> accompanying BENEFIT increases).
>
> Personally, I found Win98 runs quite a bit slower than Win2k on my hardware,
> and Win2k is more stable.
>
> It was a pretty painless switch for me. Of course, I don't depend on Windows,
> so app breakage was not a big issue, and nothing I had failed to run on Win2k
> except Word Perfect 7, which I no longer have a need for.
>
> I also play games, and Win2k is much better for that than any of the DOS
> based Windows.  In fact, a lot of games simply won't work on pre-Win2k.
>


I jumped on Win2K when it was released in February 2000, and it was a great move overall, from the standpoint of games and productivity.  There was a slight speed hit in gaming compared to Win95 (I didn't even use 98), and initial driver and consumer program support was spotty, but it was well worth it to have the superior (to 9x) process management and stability of NT, along with the boon of native DirectX support.  No more dealing with VXD's, blue screens appearing when the system wanted a floppy disk or CD-ROM inserted in the system, task manager with no way to find out which process is the CPU/memory hog, etc.  Plus your average Win2K install had a much longer shelf life than a Win98 SE install (I remember hearing about friends reinstalling after 3 months because things became so sluggish in general, versus my Win2K system which only saw a reinstall on a major component change like transitioning off of an aging hard disk, motherboard-CPU-RAM-videocard upgrades, etc.).

I never did try Windows 95 or 98 on hardware faster than 1 GHz.  I didn't see a reason for it, since 2K/XP is easier to manage.